The Second Rape

The Second Rape. This happened several years ago, I believe in Orlando, Florida, but it illustrates the point I want to make.

A women was raped and beaten severely in her apartment. She barely clung to life. The doctors finally told her family that her brain would never recover. The family had to make the terrible decision to turn off life support. Unless you’ve been through that with someone, I don’t think anyone could understand what a gut-wrenching decision that has to be. Some of her family watched her die when life-support was turned off.

There was a witness who lived just above the apartment the victim had lived in. He saw a black man standing outside her apartment the night of the attack. When police were canvassing the neighborhood afterwards, he told them what he saw.

He didn’t know the man, but police left him a number to call in case he ever saw the man again.

Not much later he called the investigators to tell them he saw the man using a pay phone. Although this may have been dramatized, they did arrive on the scene before the man finished his call.

He volunteered to go down to the police station for an interview. They asked him for a DNA sample (swab the mouth) and he said he would do it later. The law is such, they could not force him to give a DNA sample, unless they had probable cause to think he was the attacker/murderer, probable cause to take to a judge, and what they had at the time did not reach that level. The eye witness saw the man outside her apartment, but that didn’t place him in the apartment when the attack occurred.

They had the attacker’s DNA from the murder scene, and with this man’s DNA could have proven he was the person who did it. Here again, they could not force him to give his DNA.

Within a few months, he committed another rape about a half-hour away, what I call the second rape. This same man also beat her, but unlike the first victim, she survived. That might have led to his apprehension.

I’m certain the Orlando police, if I’m right on the location, probably put a surveillance on this man after the first attack and murder, trying to find some way to get his DNA. Across the country police find someplace like a fast food location where the suspect drinks from a cup or obtains something with his DNA on it, and runs it. That’s legal.

But this man must have suspected the policed were going to do that, and never left his DNA any place they could access. Or perhaps there was an Orlando law or Florida law that prohibited the police even doing that.

At any rate, he was left to do the second rape, which should never have happened.

No doubt innocent people should be protected, but I don’t know of any innocent person who would not give their DNA in any case, especially a murder case.

I think the law should read that if the police ask for a DNA sample, it should be required. Nobody walks out of a police station, without giving their DNA sample, especially somebody who has already been identified as a man standing outside a woman’s apartment the night she was attacked.

You read so much about police overreach, but swabbing a man’s mouth would have prevented this second rape. I’m sure all sorts of civil rights’ groups would be all over this, proclaiming police brutality or the BS they always spout.

The solution to that would be that each of the individuals in the protest group should have to be placed in a room, face to face with this second rape victim, and tell her a simple DNA swab should be illegal. I’d like to hear what she says to them.

These civil rights’ groups should have to visit the grave of the first victim, the woman who was raped and brutally beaten to the extent she lost her life. Visit the grave while the family is there, and tell them a simple DNA sample in the police station should be illegal.

Send the ACLU lawyers, one by one, to do the same thing, to the second victim face to face, to the grave of the first victim while the family is there.

Let’s see how much guts they have in the real world.

If I were a police investigator in Orlando, or any city that incurs these peculiar circumstances, I would have trouble sleeping at night if I knew the perpetrator committed a second or third crime on another woman because my hands were tied.

I’m sure these are good cops, hard-working cops. I’m not sure I could be that upstanding. I might break the law to bring these law breakers to justice.